U.S. and Iran Both Conflict and Converge

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An anti-American mural along a street in Tehran. The United States and Iran each face domestic pressures against closer relations, a nuclear deal notwithstanding.CreditAbedin Taherkenareh/European Pressphoto Agency

BAGHDAD — American troops advising Iraqi security forces in restive Anbar Province are sharing a base with odd bedfellows: an Iranian-backed militia that once killed United States soldiers. Both are fighting the militants of the Islamic State.

Here in the capital, though, Tehran and Washington still line up on opposite sides. The United States is urging the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government to do more to enlist members of the Sunni minority against the Islamic State. Shiite-led Iran and its proxies are thwarting that effort.

The dichotomy illustrates the complexities of the relationship between the United States and Iran in places like Iraq, where the interests of the two rivals clash and converge. Now, after a deal to limit Iran’s nuclear program cleared its biggest congressional hurdle last week, the United States will have to navigate an increasingly complicated regional maze with an Iran newly empowered by international legitimacy and relief from economic sanctions.

What is more, there are also indications that the contacts between the two countries that accompanied the nuclear negotiations have begun to produce more areas of limited collaboration in Iraq, Afghanistan and, to a lesser extent, in Yemen, adding to the tangle.

Critics say that the nuclear deal will only embolden Iran to escalate its myriad proxy campaigns against the United States and its allies: arming Hezbollah and Hamas to fight Israel; deploying Iranian troops to defend President Bashar al-Assad of Syria; backing Houthi rebels in Yemen or more shadowy militants in other Persian Gulf states; and holding Lebanese politics hostage to its interests.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has complained that the deal will enrich his country’s greatest foe. American allies in the Sunni-led monarchies of the Persian Gulf warn of widening sectarian conflict around the region like the continuing wars in Syria and Yemen.

But though the United States and Iran each face domestic pressures against closer relations, some analysts see a more collaborative relationship as an inevitable if uneasy consequence of the negotiations leading up to the nuclear deal — despite the insistence of leaders on either side that the American-brokered agreement would be limited to Iran’s nuclear program.

“Both the Iranian and American governments are going to approach expanded dialogue very gingerly,” said James Dobbins, a senior fellow at the RAND Corporation. “But there will still be a gradual increase in at least communication between the two governments on areas beyond the nuclear issue,” said Mr. Dobbins, a former senior State Department official who worked directly with Iranian diplomats to establish a new government in Kabul after the United States invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

That means the United States will face an awkward balancing act if, as expected, Iran continues its aggressive stance toward American allies in the region. “Will the United States scrap the nuclear deal if Iran sends weapons to Hamas or Hezbollah?” said Michael Stephens, an analyst with the Royal United Services Institute. “Absolutely not.”

He added: “That is why the Iranians know this is their ticket back to the big game.”

Afghanistan may be the place where there is the clearest alignment of interests — and the potential for collaboration. As the American-Iranian nuclear talks were gaining momentum last year, Iranian diplomats were also working in parallel with Secretary of State John Kerry to seal a deal in Kabul to avert an electoral deadlock and form a new government in Afghanistan, repeating a supporting role the Iranians played alongside American diplomats in 2001.

“The United States and Iran have generally followed a common line in Afghanistan for years,” so open cooperation “would be a more public manifestation of what is already going on,” said Mr. Dobbins, the former diplomat.

Both sides want to prevent the return of the Taliban and to block Al Qaeda from re-establishing safe havens.

And Tehran also worries intensely about the heavy flow of Afghan opium and refugees into Iran, which shares a long border with Afghanistan, said Michael Kugelman, a researcher on South Asia at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. “Their interests converge more in Afghanistan than either side may care to admit,” Mr. Kugelman said.

In Yemen, meanwhile, the American balancing act in relations with Iran has also been evident.

The United States has thrown its support behind a Saudi-led military intervention against a takeover by the Houthi movement in Yemen, but has also dissented from Saudi claims that Iran is controlling the Houthis.

The Saudis have said they were forced to intervene to prevent Iran from dominating their southern neighbor. But there is little evidence that the Iranians have provided significant military support to the Houthis or exercise significant control over the group, which had its own military experience and domestic weapons, said April Alley, a researcher with the International Crisis Group.

President Obama has said that the United States believes that last fall Iran initially discouraged rather than directed the Houthi advance toward Yemen’s capital, Sana. “We watched as this proceeded. There were moments where Iran was actually urging potential restraint,” the president said recently during a news conference to promote the Iran nuclear deal.

After Sana fell, were “they interested in getting arms to the Houthis and causing problems for the Saudis? Yes,” Mr. Obama added. “But they weren’t proceeding on the basis of, come hell or high water, we’re moving on a holy war here.”

Later, when Washington observed a convoy of ships from Iran moving toward Yemen, Mr. Kerry personally called his Iranian counterpart in the nuclear talks, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif — a conversation that would have been all but unthinkable before the negotiations began.

“I was on the phone in an instant to my counterpart, and made it very, very clear that this could be a major confrontation, that we were not going to tolerate it,” Mr. Kerry recently told an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations. “And he called me back, indeed, within a short span of time and said, ‘They will not land, they are not going to unload anything, they are not going to go out of international waters,’ and then they went home.”

Iraq has been the bloodiest arena of the American-Iranian rivalry. During the long American war, Iranian-backed militias like Kataib Hezbollah — the one that now shares a base in Anbar — killed more than a thousand American soldiers.

But now the Americans communicate with the Iranians through an Iraqi military official to be sure that American-led airstrikes against the Islamic State do not hit the Iranian-backed militias fighting the same enemy.

Yet it is still a deeply uncomfortable situation for the United States. American officials acknowledge that the militias are essential to fighting the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. But they worry that the groups, especially in Anbar, are collecting intelligence on them on behalf of Iran and have pressed the Iraqis — so far unsuccessfully — to remove Kataib from the base.

The nuclear deal has now raised hopes among Iraqi officials of closer cooperation between the two rivals, said Mowaffak al-Rubaie, Iraq’s former national security adviser and a lawmaker from a Shiite faction.

“For the next phase they need to coordinate in a more formal way,” he said. “I believe the two ambassadors in Baghdad are not far from meeting.”

In practical terms, Iran will regain about $50 billion of assets from the sanctions relief, according to estimates by United States Treasury officials. Far more assets held abroad had been frozen under the sanctions, but most of the rest has been already been committed or cannot be used.

But analysts say that money has never appeared to be a determining factor in Iranian policies around the region; Tehran appears to have committed to its support for Mr. Assad in Syria or opposition to the Islamic State in Iraq as strategic necessities regardless of the cost, while it has managed to achieve its goals in Yemen and elsewhere on the cheap, with relatively little investment.

“It is difficult to credit the deal for anything good, and it is difficult to blame the deal for anything bad,” said Emile Hokayem, a researcher at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “In Syria and Iraq and Yemen and Lebanon, the drivers of the conflict are local and regional, not because of the deal.”

Konstantinos Vardakis, a Greek diplomat who is the top European Union official stationed in Baghdad, said he hoped the nuclear deal would lead to broader talks with Iran about the future of both Iraq and Syria. “We need the Iranians to settle the situation,” he said, suggesting that now “the door is open to address other issues.”

But Iran’s proxies in Lebanon and Iraq say they see no such solutions. All applaud the deal as a victory for Iran and maintain that their hostility to the United States remains undiminished.

Asked about the deal, Naeem al-Aboudi, the spokesman for Asaib Ahl al-Haq, another Iranian-backed militia in Iraq, brought up a favorite conspiracy theory of Iranian clients in Iraq: that the United States created the Islamic State and has little real interest in defeating it.

“The nuclear agreement is a diplomatic affair that we are not involved in,” Mr. Aboudi said in an interview. “We’ve had a problem with the United States for a long time.”

Tim Arango reported from Baghdad, and David D. Kirkpatrick from London. Omar al-Jawoshy contributed reporting from Baghdad, and Anne Barnard from Beirut, Lebanon.

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